Africabeat

Congo: 'Fifth plane crash in five years, rising food prices the real disaster'

I received an email a few hours ago from a friend in Goma who told me the sky was literally falling.  Did my little futile bit, and translated a post by Cabiau, a Belgian aid worker living in Kinshasa, who has had a lot in the past about Congo's proclivity for plane crashes.  This is the fifth fatal crash since June 2007.

He says--and rightly so--that it takes a photogenic disaster to attract the attention of the Western media; the coverage of this accident is a flash of light on a place that otherwise exists in darkness.  I don't use the word "darkness" in the Joseph Conrad sense, but rather in the sense that if you were to ask most relatively well-educated Westerners what the deadliest conflict was since World War II, I think many (or at least the Americans) would answer, "the Vietnam War."  The International Rescue Committee estimates the death toll of the Second Congo War (1998-2003ish) is 5.4 million.

But it's not the plane crashes we should worry about.  Cabiau writes that skyrocketing food prices are the real disaster looming.

Read the post at Global Voices

African fractals, and why your computer may be African

So perhaps a better, more succinct response to Will Saletan's piece on race, genetics, and intelligence which appeared on Slate last month, is this video of a talk by Ron Eglash, an "ethno-mathematician" who studies African fractals.  Learn about the African origins of binary code, and how God, architecture, and mathematics are married in infinite regression:

Why Will Saletan's Calling for the Miscegenation of the Races

I've been meaning to respond to Will Saletan's piece in Slate last month on race, genetics and intelligence.  In it, he summarizes a number of genetic theories, which all point to the disturbing conclusion that:

"Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true."

I cannot deny the possibility that there are racial differences in average intelligence (or rather differences in average intelligence between previously isolated populations, since race is a social, not a biological concept), even though my gut reaction is disgust.  I know this is something about which I ought to remain agnostic absent credible, compelling evidence not just because that's the position from which a social scientist, whatever his or her unspoken agendas, ought to begin, but because my emotions on the subject run so damn deep, it's hard to be "objective" (as if anyone can be about a topic as dangerous as it is seductive).  Without a certain intellectual coolness, I'm liable to burst out in expletives.

Mahmoud Mamdani on Darfur

I have in the past on this blog taken potshots at the SaveDarfurers; my essential criticism is that many seem like hypocrites or bandwagoners engaging in advocacy without really understanding what it is they are advocating or why.  (I don't necessarily mean that you are, rather only that most are.)

The most common defense I hear from readers runs somewhere along the lines of, "at least they're doing something!" or "but we can't just do nothing!  we have to do something!"  or "doing something is better than doing nothing at all" etc.

Something. Nothing. Nothing something nothing.

Mahmoud Mamdani, I believe, offers an explanation for this stunning lack of articulateness in an essay  published last March in the London Review of Books when he argues that in America, the Darfur conflict has been "emptied of its political content."  He reasons this is why it's easier for sunny college kids to advocate the end of mass murder in Darfur than in Iraq, where we Americans are much more conscious that the situation has moral and political complexities--even if we can't exactly name them--not to mention our own complicity in their creation; or at least I naively cling to the hope that we have become aware of that much, even though it is certainly easier to wage a theoretical battle against a theoretical evil in lands that may as well be theoretical than it is to admit your own, very concrete sins.

From the Democracy Now interview:

Well, I was struck by the fact—because I live nine months in New York and three months in Kampala, and every morning I open the New York Times, and I read about sort of violence against civilians, atrocities against civilians, and there are two places that I read about—one is Iraq, and the other is Darfur—sort of constantly, day after day, and week after week. And I’m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq. And it puzzles me, because most of these students, almost all of these students, are American citizens, and I had always thought that they should have greater responsibility, they should feel responsibility, for mass violence which is the result of their own government’s policies. And I ask myself, “Why not?” I ask myself, “How do they discuss mass violence in Iraq and options in Iraq?” And they discuss it by asking—agonizing over what would happen if American troops withdrew from Iraq. Would there be more violence? Less violence? But there is no such agonizing over Darfur, because Darfur is a place without history, Darfur is a place without politics. Darfur is simply a dot on the map. It is simply a place, a site, where perpetrator confronts victim. And the perpetrator’s name is Arab, and the victim’s name is African. And it is easy to demonize. It is easy to hold a moral position which is emptied of its political content. This bothered me, and so I wrote about it. (emphasis added)

A very smart man with very many smart things to say.  Read more of this argument in Mamdani's LRB essay or check out the Democracy Now interview transcript.

Paris Hilton Goes to Rwanda

Yet Another Celeb Seeks Africa Cred

Paris Hilton is off to Rwanda next month to show the world that even drunk-driving billionaire heiresses can have a heart.

Africa has become an obligatory destination for celebrities--apparently even those on the B-list--to turn over a new leaf in their careers or otherwise prove they are more than just a pretty face.

Rwanda seems a logical choice; both Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor made appearances there this summer. 

After showing us a different side of rural America, Paris intends to extend the favor to Rwandans. 

But I mean, who wouldn't want Paris as their spokesperson?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the West's representation of Africa

Africa Unchained recently pointed to a Guardian article on Nigerian novelist and recent Orange Prize winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 

She criticizes the celebritization of Africa and the representation of Africa in Western media--and marvels at the fact she came all the way to London, from the "crime hell" of Lagos, where she has never had any problems with crime, only to get her bag stolen at a reading.

Perhaps I haven't been listening for long enough, but I'm getting the sense that these kinds of stories are actually multiplying, and they may even constitute a full-on backlash.  (I hope.)

Uzodinma Iweala on Saving Africa (Washington Post)

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists.

"Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR!

My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me.

"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.

Read Stop Trying to 'Save' Africa

A new campaign to "Save Africa"...with blackface!

I ended up writing a post titled "Saving Africa in blackface" for the Guardian's group blog, Comment is Free.  Here are some of my thoughts:

"I am waiting for my last day in school; the children in Africa are waiting for their first one," reads the slogan hovering alongside a young German girl who's just cute as a button. It would be just another run-of-the-mill solidarity campaign, were it not for the puzzling fact that her face, stretched into a farcical grin, is covered in mud. Let's save Africa. In blackface.

I was a bit appalled, but laughed in spite of myself. I can appreciate satire. Lord knows after Kate Moss's Nubian makeover and Gwyneth Paltrow gone native - OK, more Cherokee Indian than Chewa, actually, but why get lost in the details? - the debate over celebrity advocacy for Africa could use some.

But an email exchange with UNICEF headquarters in New York revealed that this children's minstrel show was not, as I had hoped, the latest in a long tradition of internet hoaxes trafficking in bad taste. It was an actual ad campaign to promote an actual plan to give African children an education: UNICEF Germany's "Schools for Africa" initiative. All I could do was shake my head.

(Keep reading)

Doubting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

William Easterly, father of the "aid harms" school of social justice, has an editorial in today's LA Times that mentions TED in passing ("a recent African conference") and takes aim at the anti-poverty glitterati's often negative portrayals of Africa:

JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on "Madonna's Malawi." At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that "War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they're riding hard through the back roads of Africa."...

Nicholas Kristof thinks Africa is a land of hope!

When I spoke of "pain porn" in my post about TED Global, "Writing a New Story About Africa," I must have been thinking of Nicholas Kristof.